photo by: Bremen Keasey

Sports Pavilion Lawrence is one of the city's four recreation centers.

When Lawrence’s parks and rec advisory board learned how many people had signed up for rec center memberships after the city’s first week of charging for access, there were actually gasps of surprise.

On Monday, interim parks and rec Director Lindsay Hart told the Parks, Recreation and Culture Advisory Board that 2,254 people had signed up for memberships so far — and “our goal is 3,000.”

“Oh, my!” one person at the table exclaimed. “Wow,” said another.

“It’s very exciting,” Hart said.

The city on Jan. 5 began charging for access to three of its recreation centers: Sports Pavilion Lawrence, the East Lawrence Recreation Center and Holcom Park. Hart said that not only was the city making good progress toward its membership goals, but that attendance was strong compared to last year when the centers were still free.

One rec center in Lawrence is still free — the Community Building at 115 W. 11th St., which the City Commission had chosen to keep open without a fee for a three-month trial period. It saw 239 visits in the past week, Hart said, up about 140 to 150 from this time last year.

Both East Lawrence and Holcom Park were down by several dozen visits, she said — East Lawrence had 174 visits, down about 75 from this time last year, and Holcom Park had just over 100, down about 40. But across town at Sports Pavilion Lawrence, she said, attendance had actually risen by several hundred visits, to a little over 2,500.

“That’s up over 550 compared to last year at this time,” she said. “So the visitation at Sports Pavilion Lawrence is going great and is much higher.”

Board vice chair Lee Ice asked whether these numbers included people enrolled in classes at the rec centers. No, Hart replied; they were “just scans (from people) coming in to work out and use the facility.”

The stats came with the caveat that last year, Parks and Rec was not tracking its facility visits as closely as it does now, Hart said. But she was still encouraged by what she’d seen so far.

One category of memberships has already “completely surpassed” Parks and Rec’s goal, she said: annual senior memberships. She said the goal was 260, but “we have 988 as of today” — nearly quadruple that.

“The number of seniors who had the annual, that really kind of blew me away,” member John Nalbandian said.

A category Hart didn’t have exact statistics for was the number of members who qualified for free access. The city does offer a scholarship program called a “qualified access membership” to people who meet certain income guidelines. Hart estimated that as of last week, the number of those memberships was around 150.

People interested in signing up for a membership can do so on the city’s website. The membership fees for Lawrence residents are $12 a month or $120 a year for adults; $8 a month or $80 a year for seniors ages 60 and up; and $20 a month or $200 a year for a household membership that covers up to three adults who live at the same address. People who live outside of Lawrence pay higher rates: $15 a month or $150 a year for adults, $10 a month or $100 a year for seniors, and $24 a month or $240 a year for households.

Going forward, Hart plans to continue sharing data on membership numbers once a month, as the City Commission had requested. She said that even as she was compiling the data on Monday, the memberships were continuing to roll in: “Today we had 27 sign up while I was writing out the report,” she said.

Her summation: “So far, the numbers look really good.”

Tens of thousands in spectator fees

One aspect of the rec center fee plan that hasn’t gotten as much discussion is a spectator fee for tournaments held at Sports Pavilion Lawrence, and Hart said this had already brought in more than $29,000.

The facility in west Lawrence hosts a variety of tournaments throughout the year — Hart told the Journal-World that more than a dozen were scheduled there last year, including youth volleyball and basketball tournaments. The new fee schedule charges spectators at those tournaments a $5 entry fee at the gate.

The past two weekends, Hart said, the Heart of America volleyball tournament series has been at Sports Pavilion Lawrence. “The first weekend we made over $16,000,” she said, “and the second weekend we made over $13,000.”

There are some tournaments, Hart said, that already charged their own entry fees before the city started doing this. In those cases, Hart said, the tournaments will keep collecting entry fees themselves, plus the $5 that the city charges, and then give the city its portion of the fees. Others, like Heart of America, don’t collect any fees for themselves, and in those cases Hart said city staff are the ones who will collect the gate fees.

This first tournament served as a kind of trial run for city staff on how to do that, she said.

“We’re kind of playing it as we go,” Hart said. “… It all looks good on paper, and then once you get through your first weekend you have to make changes and do what works best. But overall, our staff have handled it great, I think everybody has done a great job and it really went really well.”

Discussion, but no action, on foundation

Although Vice Mayor Mike Courtney’s proposal to pause the rec center fees was rejected 3-2 by the City Commission last month, a part of his plan got some new discussion from the advisory board on Monday: the idea of creating a parks and rec foundation.

Courtney had proposed the foundation to allow individuals and businesses to make donations that would directly serve the parks department. And board chair Vickie Collie-Akers brought up the idea at Monday’s meeting and wondered whether the advisory board should do more to explore it, such as by making a subcommittee.

Porter Arneill, the department’s assistant director for arts and culture, told the board that it was possible for them to be proactive if they wished. But some board members had reservations about the idea. As Nalbandian noted, the board hadn’t been directed to do anything about this topic yet.

“The commission hasn’t even said this is what we want to do,” Nalbandian said.

He said he’d be more comfortable exploring a foundation if a majority of the commission had expressed interest in it, as opposed to just one or two commissioners. But as it stood on Monday, he was “very reluctant to take some initiative on this.”

“To me, it sends a message to the commission,” he said. “‘Commissioners, all you have to do is open your mouth and make a suggestion, and the rest of the apparatus is going to be put into motion.'”

It would be different, he said, if the board heard about other communities with foundations for their parks and recreation departments. And Hart said that she was doing research, “meeting with other communities, (and) I’m happy to share what I find with that.” But she reiterated that there had been no direction from city leaders on the topic.

The board didn’t take any action on this on Monday, and Hart said that any future discussion would not produce changes quickly. She said that it could take up to a year to establish a foundation and get all the necessary approvals.

“So this is definitely not a quick process,” she said.

For now, Hart told the board there wasn’t any problem with the department’s scholarship program, and that foundations were typically used for funding large capital projects, not scholarships.

But Collie-Akers said part of the board’s task was to look at the metrics and see how things could be improved, and that this was especially important with the new fees.

“There’s nothing inherently wrong that we’re seeing,” she said. “But could it serve more? Particularly in the context of fees being introduced.”

And member Lisa Hallberg said she saw the idea of a foundation as something that was “lurking in the wings” as a potential course of action.

“It’s just an idea,” she said. “And if we don’t talk as citizens to our commissioners, who else is going to?”